NASA’s Planet Earth to Land at Nation’s Museums

CONTACT: Lia Unrau

PHONE: (713)
831-4794

E-MAIL: unrau@rice.edu

NASA’S PLANET EARTH PROJECT TO LAND AT NATION’S MUSEUMS

A new partnership aimed at bringing
Earth science data to the public in innovative ways through museums and science
centers was unveiled today at a scientific meeting.

The project, “Museums Teaching Planet Earth,” which can be
replicated in museums across the country, was announced at the spring American
Geophysical Union Meeting in Boston. It will develop three educational venues,
Earth Update, Earth Forum and Globe Theatre, which creates an immersive
interactive environment.

NASA’s Office of Earth Science (OES) recently held a
competition for “Earth System Information Partners” (ESIP)–projects that could
get OES data to the public in means that can become financially self-sustaining
within five years.

One of 12 winning projects, “Museums Teaching Planet Earth” is
led by Patricia Reiff, professor and chairman of the Department of Space Physics
and Astronomy at Rice University, and is a collaborative effort of Rice, the
Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) and the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh. The Johnson Space Center, the University of California at
Santa Barbara and TERC, Inc., will provide content expertise, with projection
system expertise from Sky-Skan, Inc., and Spitz, Inc.

The outreach venue that will be most accessible to museums and
schools is Earth Update, an interactive computerized exhibit of real-time Earth
science data. An outgrowth of the popular Space Update software http://spaceupdate.com developed at Rice, it is a point-and-click information system which can
run on a modest personal computer.

“Push” technology allows automatic daily updates of the data
sets to the display computers at the participating museums–even while they are
in use. Schools behind firewalls or more infrequent users can use “pull” scripts
to retrieve the day’s data whenever desired. It is fast and simple, and does not
allow the user unlimited access to the often inappropriate material on the World
Wide Web.

Organized by Earth science topic (Geosphere, Hydrosphere,
Atmosphere, Cryosphere, and Biosphere), it will explain each of these “spheres,” show the day’s data and explore long-term trends.

The second venue, Earth Forum, is a six-station Earth
simulator. A more extensive computerized system, it embodies six Earth stations,
each with its own resource (for example, for South America the resource is
biodiversity; North America is fresh water; Europe is energy; Africa is food;
Asia is air; and Oceania is the oceans). This six-station system can run either
in exhibit mode for the casual observer or in simulation mode for groups of
school children to roleplay as geographers, scientists and policy makers. Earth
Forum will be updated to include real-time data as well as archival information.

The most innovative venue will be the Globe Theatre, an
immersive interactive experience. Globe Theatre shows will envelop the visitors
in a wrap-around panorama of the Earth from space. From this unique viewpoint,
audiences have an “astronaut’s eye view” of the Earth.

Guided by former astronaut Jay Apt, author of the book “Orbit” and current director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the shows will
include many of his majestic images from space. In addition, the theater will
feature new video and still imagery from shuttle astronauts as they orbit Earth
and assemble the International Space Station.

Both the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Carnegie
Museum of Natural History have committed matching resources for major
renovations of their display facilities. Other museums and science centers,
which have installed or are anticipating installing this wrap-around projection
system, are working with Rice to ensure an engaging, educational product.

Sky-Skan will install the first Globe Theatre at the Houston
Museum of Natural Science in late 1998. The first show will include Earth
fly-over and zoom-in experiences. The theater at the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History will open in the fall of 1999.

“We’re very impressed by this new technology and the images it
can render to the planetarium dome,” says Carolyn Sumners, HMNS planetarium
director. “The Museums Teaching Planet Earth project will revolutionize the way
we visualize and remember our changing planet.”

Sybil Media of Houston will program software and render image
bases for the Earth Forum and Globe Theatre. Colin Law, research scientist at
Rice, heads the programming team for the Earth Update venues.

A web site will soon be set up at http://earth.rice.edu; for
more information, check the web site at http://space.rice.edu or
http://mtpe.com.

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